China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Survey reveals two sides to China story
A recent survey found that the subject matter of books about Chinese culture in the overseas market falls largely within the realm of traditional, rather than contemporary, culture — a trend that may not be presenting an accurate reflection of modern-day China.
Since books and publishing are an important channel for cultural communication, the Horizon Research Center examined books pertaining to Chinese culture and their overseas readership, by analyzing data extracted from e-commerce giant Amazon.
The research team selected the top 100 books with the most reviews and the top 100 books with the highest average of customer reviews within the category of Chinese culture, which respectively reflect the readers’ areas of interest and the disposition of their comments.
Due to the overlap between the two rankings, the final selection includes a total of 158 titles. Among the books appearing on both lists — suggesting they are both wellknown and have been wellreceived — the top two were found to be Tao Te Ching (Daode Jing) by Lao Tzu and The Art of War (Sunzi Bingfa) by Sun Tzu.
A significant proportion of the books selected pertained to traditional Chinese culture, including 32 books about traditional thought and philosophy, 30 books on traditional Chinese medicine and 14 works on Chinese folk customs.
The 32 books about traditional thought encompass eight editions of The Art of War, six versions of Tao Te Ching and three works of The Analects of Confucius (Lunyu). At the time the report was published, The Art of War was ranked the best-selling title in military history.
In addition to a summary of their subject matter, the survey also conducted textual and visual analyses of the book titles and the cultural imagery used on their covers. The lexical frequency of the book titles shows that the top five most frequent terms used were “medicine”, “tradition”, “war”, “dragon” and “ancient” — all of which are typical traditional Chinese cultural symbols.
On the book jackets, human characters, including the portraits of Lao Tzu, Confucius and ancient maidservants, were the most commonly noted visual elements, with a frequency of 17.72 percent. Imagery containing natural scenery, food, art and architecture were also among the most recurrent themes.
After examining their findings, researchers concluded that in terms of the diffusion of Chinese culture, traditional topics have the leading edge. They also noted that this dominance is helping to construct a biased representation of a “traditional China”, which in turn was obstructing the spread of modern Chinese culture.
These findings echo a report published earlier this year by the China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration on the level of recognition of transliterated Chinese vocabulary in major English-speaking countries.
The CFLPA report shows that terms with a higher level of recognition tended to be those related to traditional culture, such as Gugong (Forbidden City) and wushu (martial arts), while those representing modern China — such as gaotie (high-speed train) and Zhifubao (Alipay) — are less well-known.
Both reports suggest that constructing an objective and comprehensive representation of Chinese culture requires combining both the traditional and the modern. Despite the fact that these cultural icons may have taken on modernized and globalized forms, underlying Chinese philosophy should be conveyed and promoted.
According to the Horizon report, the nationalities of the authors also demonstrate that there is an imbalance in the way Chinese culture is represented. Among the selected books, those written or edited by non-Chinese authors account for the vast majority — 74.1 percent — of titles. The authors come from 11 countries Xing Yi contributed to this story.